by Mark Bowden
This nightmare unfolded in the context of larger national unease. Ground was shifting under enduring institutions of American life, and the promise that had propelled the country so dynamically through the 1950s and ’60s had soured. Jobs were scarce, and paychecks didn’t go as far—a phenomenon dubbed “stagflation.” Americans had stopped buying stocks—they were no longer betting on the future. The Vietnam War was spiraling to humiliating defeat after dominating headlines for more than a decade. President Nixon had resigned in a scandal, and each week another top member of his administration went to jail. There were revelations of domestic spying and of troubling American involvement in foreign coups and assassination plots, both ludicrous and disturbing. Government suddenly appeared not just untrustworthy but inept. Violent crime in nearby Washington had nearly doubled in the previous five years. The Summer of Love had degenerated into drug abuse and violent radicalism. Strange groups were setting off bombs and abducting people—tracking dogs used in the hunt for the Lyon sisters had been used a year earlier to look for kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. On TV, the most popular character was Archie Bunker, a blue-collar American male railing hilariously against the collapse of his preferred social order.
The day Sheila and Kate went missing was an early taste of spring. There had been two snowfalls that March, but the weather before Easter week had turned warm and muggy. That Tuesday morning John worked the midnight-to-six shift, after which he drove home and went to bed. He woke up at one in the afternoon to an empty house. Off school for spring break, Sheila and Kate had gone to the mall. They had left with about two dollars between them, complaining that the cost of a pizza slice at the Orange Bowl had recently gone up five cents. There had been a time when Sheila did not want her younger sister with her, but in recent months Mary felt they had begun to play happily together again. Mary had gone bowling, and the Lyon boys were off with friends in the neighborhood. Mary and Joe were home soon after John got up, and when he went back to bed for a mid-afternoon nap, she took a rake to the matted leaves in the backyard that had been buried in snow just weeks before. At dusk she began missing the girls. She assumed they were with friends and having fun. They were usually prompt at dinnertime, and ordinarily Sheila would call if they were delayed. But she had not called. John and Mary ate dinner with their boys, two empty chairs at the table, Mary now annoyed. With still no word after they’d finished, they started calling all the girls’ friends. Nothing. They drove around the neighborhood with a mounting sense of alarm. Then they called the police.
Many teenagers and even children go absent from their homes—there had been eighteen hundred reported cases in Montgomery County alone in the previous year, but most involved slightly older children, and in nearly every case they were quickly found. That this report was different was rapidly becoming apparent, and when the girls remained missing through that night it became a crisis. According to John and Mary, this was utterly out of character. Both girls were obedient. They were honor roll students. Kate was the outgoing, athletic, silly one. She was a fifth grader at Oakland Terrace Elementary School and had a poster of pop singers Loggins and Messina in her bedroom. Her mother had just given her permission to get her ears pierced. Sheila was the dreamy one, quieter and more of a homebody. The poster in her room was of the romantic folk balladeer John Denver. She had started to help her mother cook, had begun wearing eye shadow, and had recently taken her first babysitting jobs. A seventh grader at Newport Junior High, she was hoping to make the school’s cheerleading squad. Neither girl had taken money from her piggy bank or extra clothing, telltale signs of a runaway.
“No,” John told me, with crisp certainty. “They did not run away. I really wish there was a reason for believing they did.”
As a green, twenty-three-year-old reporter, I tried to see the Lyon case as a story, my first chance to write front-page news. The people I wrote about were subjects, and tragedy was a thing that happened to others. But the Lyons were people I liked, even admired. I could not witness their pain dispassionately.
Of the thousands of missing children cases reported each year, those involving children taken by a stranger number only one one-hundredth of one percent—on average about one hundred cases a year in the United States, a number that has changed little for as long as such statistics have been kept. Nearly all missing children are found quickly. For two to be taken at once and to disappear completely is a thing so rare that it’s almost true to say it never happens—the numbers are so low they cannot be meaningfully framed as a percentage of overall kidnappings. Needless to say, very few people are ever touched personally by such crimes, but today’s omnipresent tabloid-style journalism and social media so magnify every occurrence that people are unduly afraid. American children in the twenty-first century lead far more sheltered, supervised lives than children of earlier times. Only thirteen percent still walk to school. Parents who leave a child untended for even a short time may find themselves reported to the police. While today we can all too readily imagine the disappearance of a child, in 1975 it was shocking—and all the more so in this case because it was two children. Imagining how or why was difficult. The problem of controlling two alarmed children at those ages suggested more than one kidnapper, which raised the question, why? What would motivate two people or a group? A sex-trafficking ring? A circle of pedophiles? Just speculating about it conjured scenarios that made you ashamed to be human.
A few weeks after the girls vanished, as if to underscore the potential for cruelty, opportunists began to surface. There were psychics who claimed to have “seen” where the girls were. There were extortionists. One man called the Lyon home and said he would return Sheila and Kate for a payment of $10,000. John drove to the appointed location, a bus station in Annapolis, with a briefcase—in it was just $101, enough to make the crime a felony. He was told to wait there for a pay phone to ring. It did. The caller, a man, instructed him to walk across the street to the county courthouse and put the briefcase in a trash can inside the first-floor men’s room. The man said he would then drop the girls off in front of the building. With police watching from a distance, John did as instructed. He then stood expectantly for hours before the courthouse, hopefully eyeing every car that passed. He and his police escort only gave up when the courthouse shut down for the day. They retrieved the briefcase and drove home. John was desperately disappointed and furious. The same man phoned the next morning and said that he hadn’t followed through because there were too many cops around. John pointed out the stupidity of selecting a courthouse if he was trying to avoid cops. He told the man not to call back unless he could put one of the girls on the phone. They did not hear from him again.
There were other, even less sophisticated extortion attempts. One caller told John and Mary to drop $6,000 in an air vent outside the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department, and another instructed them to stand with exactly $1,050 outside the Orange Bowl at Wheaton Plaza. Two months after the girls disappeared, a tip from a Dutch psychic who claimed to have helped solve the Boston Strangler case sent 150 police and National Guardsmen on a daylong search of nearby Rock Creek Park. They found nothing. John and Mary gradually closed themselves off from such contacts, stopped giving interviews, and worked to avoid being consumed with bitterness. The loss of a child is a shattering experience for any family. For the Lyons—John, Mary, Jay, and Joe—it would be a hard task to salvage what was left.
To me, the story was sad and beyond understanding. Like everyone else, I waited for the police to find something and explain the mystery. In time, the story moved off the front page and then out of the news completely, overtaken by fresh outrages. As the decades passed I wrote thousands more stories, big ones and small ones. I raised five children of my own. I experienced tragedy and loss in my own life. I became a grandfather—of two little blond-haired girls, as a matter of fact. Few stories haunted me as this one did.
When he was nearing retirement, Ed Golian, who had joined the search effort as a cadet thi
rty years earlier, was assigned to the department’s cold case team in 2011, typically a last stop before hanging up the badge. As had other detectives before him, he reopened the Lyon files, ending his career with the same case that started it.
Today police have new tools for old crimes. DNA testing offers seemingly magic solutions to decades-old mysteries as long as physical evidence has been preserved. With no bodies and no crime scene, there would be no such magic for this one. Computers held promise. No longer a novelty, they cast a far wider net than even the massive application of manpower applied in those first weeks to finding Sheila and Kate. The machines made it inestimably easier for Ed to complete the old sex-offender lists, to compile time lines, and to cross-check names and incidents for intersections with Wheaton Plaza in 1975. The old list of car registrations that met the IBM man’s description was broadened and rechecked. More than three decades later Ed found, of course, that most of these cars had vanished to junkyards. Many owners were no longer alive. Still, all the leads were tracked down, yielding nothing.
This is what cold case teams do. They embrace the tedium. They are the turners of last stones, laboring in a landscape beyond hope. The task is Sisyphean. By its nature, investigation continually churns up new leads, prolonging both the work and the frustration. The Lyon file filled thirty boxes. Golian worked with four other detectives: Chris Homrock, who at forty-one had twenty years of experience in the department; and three who, like Ed, were nearing retirement, Joe Mudano, Bobby Nichols, and Kenny Penrod.
Instead of adding more to the files, the squad decided to weed them. The detectives set out to identify every plausible suspect and reinvestigate enough to either eliminate him or keep him. That work took two years. All the detectives were working on other cases at the same time—Chris was running the department’s robbery section, and Kenny led the homicide section—but the puzzle was such a noteworthy challenge that it was always on their minds. The suspects included a fellow named Fred Coffey in South Carolina, whom Kenny favored; another suspicious predator, Arthur Goode; and the infamous sexual sadist and serial killer James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, all of whom had stories with potential links to the Lyon girls. None could be completely eliminated.
But one jumped out—Ray Mileski, who had died in prison in 2005.
MILESKI
By 2013, Chris Homrock was the only one left in the Lyon squad. One by one, Ed Golian, Joe Mudano, Bobby Nichols, and Kenny Penrod had retired. Chris had become obsessed with the case. He talked about it constantly with his wife, Amy, also a police officer, and she encouraged him. If anyone could crack the mystery, she thought, Chris could. He was a natural. He always seemed to know what question to ask next; he could think on his feet better than anyone else she had ever met. No matter how long and hard he worked, no matter how elusive the answers, Amy would have been the last to tell him to stop. Just a few years younger than Sheila and Kate, and having grown up in nearby Potomac, Maryland, she remembered their disappearance well. Her parents referred to the case as a “permanent loss of innocence.” Now she and Chris had two daughters who were roughly the same ages Sheila and Kate had been. They could only imagine John and Mary’s suffering. So Amy was all in, even if for Chris it meant working long hours, losing sleep, and not eating right. Not that she didn’t try to tamp down his intensity now and then, reminding him that the girls were not tied to a tree somewhere awaiting his rescue. His job was to figure out what had happened, to find who had taken them, perhaps to bring the story of their terrible last days—and maybe their remains—home at last to the Lyon family.
But by the early summer of that year, Chris was ready to give up. He felt weighed down with both responsibility and futility. Despite his years of effort, the trail, if anything, had grown colder. Mileski was the one thing that had kept him going.
A petty criminal, killer, and audacious pedophile, Mileski had inserted himself into the investigation. In 1975, he had called the Montgomery County police twice: first with a suggestion—they should offer immunity to the person who kidnapped the girls if he returned them—and then, two weeks after the girls vanished, with a tip. He said he had seen the widely publicized suspect, the gray-haired man with a tape recorder, weeks before the Lyon sisters disappeared, trying to lure children into his car at another mall. He gave the police a detailed account. Then, two years later, the same Ray Mileski shot and killed his wife and one of his sons. In prison for those crimes, he had talked a lot about the Lyon sisters, telling other inmates that he knew where the girls were buried. Police investigated these claims in 1982, partially excavating Mileski’s old backyard and basement. They found nothing.
That had stalled active work on Mileski, but when the squad took another hard look at him in 2011, interest in him deepened. Reviewing old witness interviews from after he was arrested for murder, the detectives learned that one possible motive for the killings had been to prevent his wife and son from revealing his connection to the Lyon case. On his bedside table, the night of the murders, police had found a slip of paper with John Lyon’s phone number on it.
And the more Chris looked, the more he found. Witness after witness said Mileski was known to pick up young boys and girls for sex. One said he had done this once at Wheaton Plaza. Another said he had seen two little blond girls in Mileski’s basement. One woman said that Mileski had raped her on two different occasions when she was a teenager and that he had held sex parties at his suburban home. Men admitted, under hard questioning, that as boys they had been intimidated by Mileski into engaging in sex acts. Chris learned that Mileski had been part of a group of men who engaged in such activities, sometimes gathering at parties to share young victims.
It all fit. Mileski had been a pedophile associated with other pedophiles who swapped child pornography and groomed and shared victims. In time, Chris came to believe in his bones that this was his man, but the case was all circumstantial. He had talked the young couple who owned Mileski’s old house into letting him rip out the carpeting in their basement to inspect the concrete floor. He found nothing (and paid to recarpet the floor). At one point Chris learned that Mileski had purchased undeveloped land in Lancaster County, Virginia. Chris then spent weeks there, living in a motel, supervising a dig on the property in a futile search for remains. He would come home and tell Amy how close he felt, almost as if he could hear the Lyon girls calling to him from their graves. He found nothing. Now he wanted to go back to the old Mileski basement and tear through the concrete, but no judge was going to okay that without a strong justification. The gut feelings of a veteran detective didn’t count.
Chris had run out of moves. Continually paging through the files, he felt as if he were wearing deeper ruts in a well-worn road. No lead had gone unpursued, no witness unquestioned. It made him angry and stung his pride. He considered himself a pro, and he had struck out. He was at his desk one evening, early that summer, reviewing documents so familiar he could almost recite their contents, when it struck him. He was finished. He had done everything he could do. He was not a man to give up, but he had reached a dead end. The feeling surprised him. He walked to the lavatory and splashed water on his face. It was not so much a decision as a recognition. There was nothing left for him to do. It was deeply disappointing but also a relief. He would put the burden down. If Sheila and Kate were still alive, they would both be middle-aged, a good bit older than John and Mary had been in 1975. Like all those before him, Chris had failed. At least he could tell the Lyons, in good conscience, that he had done everything possible.
But when he returned to his desk, staring at him from a stack of old familiar files was one he could not remember having seen—the six-page transcript of Lloyd Welch’s April 1, 1975, statement. He was first astonished that he had somehow missed it. How could that be? And how had it come to sit on top of the papers on his desk? Could someone else have put it there? No one was working nearby. It had clearly come from his own collection. He read it for the first time, somewhat amazed, and f
elt a jolt when he reached the end. This witness had told the detectives that the man who led the girls from the mall “walked with a little limp.”
That had to be Mileski! During a lifetime of run-ins with the law, Mileski had once been caught in a home burglary and had been shot in the leg by police. Afterward, he limped.
Chris could not believe he had never seen this. Here was someone, this Lloyd Welch, who may have actually seen Mileski in the mall with the girls! If this was true—an eyewitness!—it might be the break he needed.
He showed the old statement to two robbery detectives who worked for him, Dave Davis and Kari Widup.
As they read it, Chris could hardly contain his excitement.
“See the part about him walking with a limp?” he said. “He’s describing Ray Mileski!”
Both detectives agreed that it was intriguing, but neither knew enough about the case to fully share Chris’s excitement. Dave, the seasoned interrogator, noted that the witness’s recall in this old statement seemed suspiciously detailed. In his experience, it went well beyond what any normal teenager would have to offer. Most would never look twice at two little girls. Still, he could see the importance of a potential living witness.
“He would be in his fifties now,” said Dave, which meant there was a good chance he was still around.
Welch’s old flunked polygraph didn’t mean much to Dave; he put little stock in the device. He told Chris he thought it was a good find. Running to a meeting, Chris asked him to do some Internet sleuthing to see whether he could find the man.
